Another disaster hidden within Obamacare–Electronic Health Records

An important—and costly—plank of Obamacare is the forced changeover to EHR. However, as health care informatics guru Scot Silverstein MD tells us, there seem to be endless issues with EHR products. Case in point: University of Arizona Health System.

As Silverstein reports, upwards of $100 million was spent on EHR, which could have financed an entire new wing to the facility. As the University’s own internal website devoted to EHR proclaims, “We’ve resolved 6,036 issues and have 3,517 open issues.” Scot continues…

“These issues are in a supposedly mature product for which this organization has spent enormous sums of money, that has undergone ‘innovation’ for several decades now. Many of the ‘issues’ reduce patient safety, and could or already may have resulted in patient harm. Such items include pharmacy medication mapping errors, microbiology results mapping incorrectly, and errors transmitting prescriptions.”

“They are also advising their staff to speak in glowing, unsubstantiated terms to patients about an EHR system that has 10,000 issues, and not seeking patient consent to its use in mediating and regulating their care—or giving elective patients the information that might allow them to choose another less buggy hospital.”

From patient care to patient records: High tech, expensive, and the results don’t matter.

The purpose of the EHR is not quality patient care. Indeed, talk to any doctor about how bad these systems are and how hard it actually is to figure out what is going on with patients.

The purpose of the EHR is for billing…it allows hospitals, in particular, to game the system to maximize reimbursement for the diagnostic codes they can get away with,even if the care isn’t much different between the codes. Second, it allows hospitals to institute protocol medicine and force doctors to practice in a way the hospital wants…according to population based statistics, which means if you have a complex problem, you likely will fall outside the protocols.

The government has also been trying to drive doctors out of private practice and into employment by hospitals, which means they don’t work for the patient anymore…they work for a hospital CEO, who has a fiduciary, not patient care responsibilty. As a group, hospital CEO’s hate doctors. In turn it is easier for the government to control 500000 doctors by controlling the roughly 5.700 hospitals in the USA.

In any event, the doctor is monitored for costs, and if they fall outside of arbitrary guidelines, are counseled about not being cost effective. Either quit spending money or find another job.

Finally, the government is encouraging nurse practitioners and other vastly lesser trained people to become doctors, The reason…they don’t know what they don’t know, and will follow a protocol right into a patient’s grave…but hey, you have to kill a few people for the good of the many, right?